I smell troll. Firstly, why on earth would anyone want to show a picture of a shaven scrotum to a woman? Shaving fetishes are generally a gay guy thing. If a woman has a shaving fetish, then what else do you think she is likely to be into?
It's always best with that sort of thing to be there in person.
Well, if you want an Open Source Taser, it's not hard to build one. A Taser is basically just an oscillator and a thwacking great step-up transformer. You can even use the transformer's primary winding (which is inductive) as the timing element in the oscillator.
If you ask the same question of many different people who are mutual strangers, and many of the people you ask give you the same answer, doesn't that possibly suggest something, maybe?
It's a programming language for cats, based on "kitty pidgin" (no, not the one your cat dragged in and left festering under the spare bed).
If you haven't seen any of those daft kitty pictures with captions, like a cat watching a washing machine with "THIS TELLY R BORING, WHERE IZ REMOTE?" you probably won't get it.
There's no saying that they had to be thought up by a mind. Intrinsic behaviours just are {he argued circularly}.
Anyway, any mind that existed would have to be obeying some set of laws which already existed. The only solution to the infinite regression is that the laws must have existed completely before any mind could exist; and since merely existing would be making use of the laws, the mind would not have to think them up.
There is a strong temptation is to think in anthropomorphic terms, but it is a mistake to do so in this case. Something doesn't have to be actually imagined to be capable of existing; but as far as we humans are concerned, if we have never imagined it then we would never recognise it if it did exist. The mistake is supposing that the laws of nature are the product of a mind at all. It can only make sense for them not to be.
OK, then. Intrinsic properties and behaviours of things, and the inevitable, predictable and repeatable effects of actions to which they lead directly.
Except that "everything obeys the same rules" and "God controls everything" are in no way equivalent.
You can look for evidence of two things not obeying the same rules. During your search, the more things you find that do obey the same rules, the greater your confidence that it might be true. If you think you have found evidence of such an anomaly, then you have to re-examine all the evidence, because it's possible that your own understanding of the rules is in error. (Hence, relativity..... if you assume all velocities are much smaller than the speed of light, then Einstein's equations simplify to Newton's equations.)
There are only three "articles of faith" for a scientist. The first is that everything in the universe can be explained in terms of a set of rules, regardless of the extent to which we know and understand the rules. The second is that these rules apply without exception to everything in the universe. The third is that the rules are unchangeable.
There's no reason why the MP3 player part has to take any notice of the mass-storage part -- it could simply ignore any files not sent through the proprietary, write-only interface. Or, the device could just do whatever checks it does to determine whether a file is a playable media file; and if so, refuse to allow it to be read via the mass-storage interface.
It's a huge tragedy that exactly half of mankind have median-and-below IQs.
Fixed.
The median (average calculated by lining up values in order from lowest to highest and taking the one at the halfway point) IQ is 100 as a matter of definition.
Defence: My $15 mp3 player containing these watermarked tracks was lost. I didn't report it to the police at the time because the value was so trivial they would have told me to 'go away' (but not so politely).
The easy way around that would be for manufacturers to make MP3 players "write only" via the USB port -- so files cannot be read back once transferred (only erased or overwritten).
It wouldn't surprise me if the Windows software for these devices already emulates that.
You can now get record / CD players that can record MP3s directly to SD/MMC memory cards or USB mass storage devices, straight from CD or LP, without the use of a computer. Check out one of those catalogues that fall out of the Radio Times while you are browsing in the newsagent's.
I think any shopkeeper would willingly help you photocopy a bestselling novel, given how much they would make on it. Let's say 600 pages at 10p a copy, that's £60. Obviously they don't get all of that, but I bet the chunk they make is still way more than they would make selling the book (which they have still got, of course). As for risks, well, the biggest risk attendant with photocopying an entire book is that you'll drop the huge stack of papers and get them out-of-order. Rationalisations aside, your point was spot-on; it's cheaper to buy the official product.
There's a price point below which CDs would no longer be economically feasible to copy, and I reckon that's about £4.
Audio CD players are not multi-session aware. They see only the first session on the disc.
CD-ROM drives are multi-session aware. They see all sessions on the disc.
Every session has a TOC. The second and subsequent sessions' TsOC are supposed to be supersets of previous sessions' TsOC. So it should be enough to read the TOC from the last session on the disc. However, some little scroat discovered that if you put in bogus details for the tracks in session one in the TOC for session two, then a CD-ROM drive can't ordinarily access them.
In my experience, cdparanoia will recover audio from almost any CD; especially when used with an older CD-ROM drive. Don't let the speed be a problem. After all, you only need to do it once per CD!
Copy protection is the exact same way. It only needs to be strong enough so that for most people, their utility is maximized by doing something *other* than copying the work. The person adding the copy protection is, just like you, trying to manipulate the risk:reward ratio of copying.
Yes, but that "something *other* than copying the work" might well turn out to be "copying a copy of the work that someone else already made".
You fail to account for people breaking copy-protection just for the hacker challenge factor (I'm guilty of that; once I even bought a CD I didn't even like, just to see if I could crack the copy-protection..... it fell at once to cdparanoia, leaving me feeling rather short-changed). It only takes for one person to break the copy-protection (and, trust me, it is breakable) and seed a torrent. From then on, the protection is meaningless. The lock on the door may be sound, but it doesn't help a lot when the walls have collapsed!
Since all copy-protection technology is expensive proprietary snake-oil sold by disingenuous hand-waving spivs, it must cost the record companies more to release a copy-protected CD -- which will still be copied just as heavily as if it was not protected -- than it would cost them to release a non-protected CD. The only people who are benefitting are the snake-oil pedlars.
Question for the record companies: If there are so many photocopiers in bookshops, why didn't people just photocopy Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows instead of buying it?
Thats the reason we still have the same X86 architecture since like a million years ago, noone is chump enough to make something totally different that nothing runs on
We are still using x86 because there is a lot of software that was written for x86 and does not come with Source Code. That is all. Given more software for which the Source Code were available, there would be no need to stick to x86. The clock is ticking down now until the (at least first-generation) ARM patents expire; and at the same time, a new initiative is being created to provide the developing world with computing power based on Open Source ideals. OLPC mark II will very probably be ARM-based.
This is just mean-spiritedness on the manufacturers' part. If you can sell a multicore chip for a certain amount of money and still make a profit, turning off some of the cores is just..... mean.
A beta version of Duke Nukem Forever is actually available for download >em>right now, from this address. The file is a bootable.iso CD image. Burn it to a CD (be sure to choose the right option: you want to make a CD from an ISO image, not a CD with just one file on it..... that won't work), then reboot your computer with the disc in the drive. At the boot prompt which appears, type "autonuke" (without the quotes) to automatically start a game of Duke Nukem Forever.
Please remember this is beta test software and all features may not be complete.
Driver software for Linux is approved by one central authority, and Linux actually supports more devices Out Of The Box than Windows. Reason being, there were many older devices for which new Windows drivers were never written; so they won't work with fully-patched-up Windows 2000, Windows XP or Vista.
Linux is infamous for forcing the user to chase down so esoteric option in a text config file.
It's not esoteric or obscure. If you have a program, for example wibbulator, you most often can expect its configuration to be stored in/etc/wibbulator -- which, depending on the sophistication involved, may be a simple file or a folder containing several files. What's more, if you want to turn off blah messages, the option is generally a line something like enableblahnotify 1 in the configuration file (or in a file in the configuration folder) which can be changed with a text editor. Most programmers also support the use of comments in configuration files, so you may even see something like # change this to 1 if these notifications annoy you suppressblahnotify = 0 in the file. Or you can have a.wibbulatorrc file in your home folder, which is built with the same syntax and contains per-user options which override the system-wide settings.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be happy if people just learned to write their reply BELOW my message, so I could see what they were responding to.
I smell troll. Firstly, why on earth would anyone want to show a picture of a shaven scrotum to a woman? Shaving fetishes are generally a gay guy thing. If a woman has a shaving fetish, then what else do you think she is likely to be into?
It's always best with that sort of thing to be there in person.
Well, if you want an Open Source Taser, it's not hard to build one. A Taser is basically just an oscillator and a thwacking great step-up transformer. You can even use the transformer's primary winding (which is inductive) as the timing element in the oscillator.
If you ask the same question of many different people who are mutual strangers, and many of the people you ask give you the same answer, doesn't that possibly suggest something, maybe?
If you're going to link to a website, first make sure there is actually something there.
It's a programming language for cats, based on "kitty pidgin" (no, not the one your cat dragged in and left festering under the spare bed).
If you haven't seen any of those daft kitty pictures with captions, like a cat watching a washing machine with "THIS TELLY R BORING, WHERE IZ REMOTE?" you probably won't get it.
Anyway, any mind that existed would have to be obeying some set of laws which already existed. The only solution to the infinite regression is that the laws must have existed completely before any mind could exist; and since merely existing would be making use of the laws, the mind would not have to think them up.
There is a strong temptation is to think in anthropomorphic terms, but it is a mistake to do so in this case. Something doesn't have to be actually imagined to be capable of existing; but as far as we humans are concerned, if we have never imagined it then we would never recognise it if it did exist. The mistake is supposing that the laws of nature are the product of a mind at all. It can only make sense for them not to be.
OK, then. Intrinsic properties and behaviours of things, and the inevitable, predictable and repeatable effects of actions to which they lead directly.
Except that "everything obeys the same rules" and "God controls everything" are in no way equivalent.
..... if you assume all velocities are much smaller than the speed of light, then Einstein's equations simplify to Newton's equations.)
You can look for evidence of two things not obeying the same rules. During your search, the more things you find that do obey the same rules, the greater your confidence that it might be true. If you think you have found evidence of such an anomaly, then you have to re-examine all the evidence, because it's possible that your own understanding of the rules is in error. (Hence, relativity
There are only three "articles of faith" for a scientist. The first is that everything in the universe can be explained in terms of a set of rules, regardless of the extent to which we know and understand the rules. The second is that these rules apply without exception to everything in the universe. The third is that the rules are unchangeable.
But the bathwater is minging, and the baby is dead.
There's no reason why the MP3 player part has to take any notice of the mass-storage part -- it could simply ignore any files not sent through the proprietary, write-only interface. Or, the device could just do whatever checks it does to determine whether a file is a playable media file; and if so, refuse to allow it to be read via the mass-storage interface.
The median (average calculated by lining up values in order from lowest to highest and taking the one at the halfway point) IQ is 100 as a matter of definition.
I will not buy this record. It is scratched!
Actually, if the ticket was for 1/8/08, then they're early -- by six and a half months.
Pay rises for accountants all round!
It wouldn't surprise me if the Windows software for these devices already emulates that.
You can now get record / CD players that can record MP3s directly to SD/MMC memory cards or USB mass storage devices, straight from CD or LP, without the use of a computer. Check out one of those catalogues that fall out of the Radio Times while you are browsing in the newsagent's.
I think any shopkeeper would willingly help you photocopy a bestselling novel, given how much they would make on it. Let's say 600 pages at 10p a copy, that's £60. Obviously they don't get all of that, but I bet the chunk they make is still way more than they would make selling the book (which they have still got, of course). As for risks, well, the biggest risk attendant with photocopying an entire book is that you'll drop the huge stack of papers and get them out-of-order. Rationalisations aside, your point was spot-on; it's cheaper to buy the official product.
There's a price point below which CDs would no longer be economically feasible to copy, and I reckon that's about £4.
Audio CD players are not multi-session aware. They see only the first session on the disc.
CD-ROM drives are multi-session aware. They see all sessions on the disc.
Every session has a TOC. The second and subsequent sessions' TsOC are supposed to be supersets of previous sessions' TsOC. So it should be enough to read the TOC from the last session on the disc. However, some little scroat discovered that if you put in bogus details for the tracks in session one in the TOC for session two, then a CD-ROM drive can't ordinarily access them.
In my experience, cdparanoia will recover audio from almost any CD; especially when used with an older CD-ROM drive. Don't let the speed be a problem. After all, you only need to do it once per CD!
You fail to account for people breaking copy-protection just for the hacker challenge factor (I'm guilty of that; once I even bought a CD I didn't even like, just to see if I could crack the copy-protection
Since all copy-protection technology is expensive proprietary snake-oil sold by disingenuous hand-waving spivs, it must cost the record companies more to release a copy-protected CD -- which will still be copied just as heavily as if it was not protected -- than it would cost them to release a non-protected CD. The only people who are benefitting are the snake-oil pedlars.
Question for the record companies: If there are so many photocopiers in bookshops, why didn't people just photocopy Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows instead of buying it?
This is just mean-spiritedness on the manufacturers' part. If you can sell a multicore chip for a certain amount of money and still make a profit, turning off some of the cores is just ..... mean.
A beta version of Duke Nukem Forever is actually available for download >em>right now, from this address. The file is a bootable .iso CD image. Burn it to a CD (be sure to choose the right option: you want to make a CD from an ISO image, not a CD with just one file on it ..... that won't work), then reboot your computer with the disc in the drive. At the boot prompt which appears, type "autonuke" (without the quotes) to automatically start a game of Duke Nukem Forever.
Please remember this is beta test software and all features may not be complete.
I call bullshit.
Driver software for Linux is approved by one central authority, and Linux actually supports more devices Out Of The Box than Windows. Reason being, there were many older devices for which new Windows drivers were never written; so they won't work with fully-patched-up Windows 2000, Windows XP or Vista.
# change this to 1 if these notifications annoy you
suppressblahnotify = 0
in the file. Or you can have a
The Windows registry is totally non-obvious.